1. “It’s not quite what I had in mind.” – What the bloody hell is this?
2. “That’s a bit off.” – I will never forgive you for what you just said.
3. “Oh yes, he’s a lot of fun.” – He’s an absolute nightmare.

4. “They’re fine once you get to know them.” – They’re arseholes.

5. “It rings a bell.” – I have no idea what you’re talking about.

6. “Fancy a drink?” – Fancy staying out until 3am and waking up with your face glued to a kebab?

7. “We’re going on a date.” — We’re getting pissed together.

8. “I got a bit tipsy last night.” – I drank 17 pints and then punched a police horse.

9. “Picnic” — Daytime piss-up.

10. “Barbecue” — Piss-up in the garden.

11. “It got a bit lively.” – The police were called.

12. “I’m doing Drynuary.” – I’ve stopped drinking during the day.

13. “I’m a bit tired.” – I’m hungover.

14. “I’m feeling a bit under the weather, to be honest.” – I have alcohol poisoning.

15. “I’m a tad poorly.” – Kill me.

16. “You look like you had fun last night!” – You look like you slept in a bin.

17. “It’s OK, we’ve not been here long either.” – We’ve been here for ages and we’ll never forgive you for keeping us waiting.

18. “Yes, it’s great, I love it.” – I am very dismayed by this haircut.

24. “It’s totally fine if you can’t make it.” – I don’t want you to come.

25. “It could be worse.” – No, it couldn’t.

26. “I’ll have a word with them about it.” – I’ll never mention this to them.

27. “It is what it is.” – I can’t be bothered to fix this thing, so stop complaining.

28. “Truth be told, I’m a little bit miffed.” – I’m going to stab someone.
29. “Want to have lunch together?” – Want to run to Greggs and back in the rain?
30. “It was OK, but I wouldn’t order it again.” – This meal was horrible, deeply disappointing, and shit.

41. “You should come over for dinner sometime.” – I will never invite you over for dinner.

42. “Ooh, I could get used to this!” – Something very faintly luxurious has just happened, e.g. being offered a cup of tea.

43. “Can you pop it in an email?” – Please stop talking.

44. “That’s a very good question.” – One that I don’t know the answer to.

45. “Can I borrow you for a second?” – You’re in deep shit.

46. “Now, don’t be alarmed, but…” – Be very, very alarmed.
47. “Let’s agree to disagree.” – I’m obviously right, but I’ve run out of things to say.

48. “Look, let’s just forget it.” – I will never, ever forget this.

49. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.” – I have no idea what to say about the crushing disappointment you’ve just experienced.
50. “Oh, hi! Sorry, I didn’t see you there.” – I was actively trying to avoid you.

51. “Well, that’s not quite what happened.” – Will your lies never end?

52. “There’s been a bit of a mix-up.” – I’ve ruined all of your plans and destroyed everything you hold dear.
53. “Only if you’re making one.” – Why yes, I desperately want a cup of tea.

British photographer David Hamilton found dead in Paris, as his alleged rape victims say he has escaped justice[ by Henry Samuel | 26 NOVEMBER 2016 | via The Telegraph]

David Hamilton | Flavie Flament

British photographer David Hamilton has died in Paris on Friday night at the age of 83 after committing suicide, according to police sources.

Mr Hamilton, who had lived much of his life in France and whose works had appeared in high-end fashion magazines, was found unresponsive in his home by a neighbour who alerted emergency services, the sources said.

It comes as a French presenter who accused the photographer of raping her and several other victims when they were teenagers said his apparent suicide had denied them justice.

“By his cowardice, (Hamilton) condemns us again to silence and the inability to see him convicted. The horror of this news will never wipe out that of our sleepless nights," said Flavie Flament.

Famed for his soft-focus portraits of unclothed girls, Mr Hamilton last week denied allegations by a French radio host and three other women that he raped them while they were in their early teens.

"Today I am the subject of no legal proceedings. This oversteps the presumption of innocence. I am innocent and must considered so," he told Agence France Presse last week.

"The instigator of this media lynching is seeking her quarter of an hour of fame through slander. I will be filing several legal complaints in the coming days," he said.

Flavie Flament, a presenter on RTL radio, alleged the photographer sexually assaulted her when she was 13 during a photo shoot at a nudist camp in Cap d'Agde, southern France, in the mid-1980s after persuading her parents to let him work alone with their daughter.

"La consolation" by Flavie Flament

She recounted the alleged rape in a book, The Consolation, out last month. While she did not name Mr Hamilton in the work, she put his photograph of her as a young girl on its cover.

Last Friday, she confirmed she was referring to him after being contacted by other women with near-identical allegations.

"When I chose with my publisher to put this photo on the cover, I knew that it would prompt other testimonies. And I can tell you that I wasn't the only one to have gone through this abuse, this rape by this photographer. I knew I couldn't be the only one," Ms Flament, 42, told France 2.

The case re-ignited a debate over the statutes of limitation for rape in France.

Currently, a woman cannot file for rape more than 20 years after reaching the age of 18. Ms Flamant said that the memories of the rape only returned to her when she was reaching 38 - too late to file for charges.

On Tuesday, Laurence Rossignol, French women's rights minister, announced that she had nominated Ms Flament to conduct a "mission" to look into whether the statutes of limitation should change.

In interviews with Nouvel Observateur, the weekly magazine, two alleged victims recounted how a "smiling" Mr Hamilton – then in his fifties – had approached them while they were 13 and 14 and on holiday with their parents in Cap d'Agde, where the photographer had bought a flat.

They said he could be seen every day accompanied "without fail by a very young slim blonde girl walking up and down the beach in search of models".

His posters were sold the world over and his postcards were on sale in all the seaside resort's shops.

He had by then sold dozens of photographic books with combined sales well into the millions, five feature films, countless magazine publications and museum and gallery exhibitions.

"To be noticed by him was to be the chosen one," they told the magazine.

"When he offered to do a trial shoot, my father was so proud, his eyes were twinkling," said one.

She said the first took place in a small seaside flat on a terrace in the presence of her father and Mr Hamilton's former wife Gertrude. However, for the second shoot they were alone.

"Can you keep a secret?" he allegedly whispered in her ear. "I was very uneasy and very intimated," she told Nouvel Observateur, recounting how he went on to rape her. All said they were too petrified and shocked to react. One alleged he said afterwards: "You're lucky I chose you because you're not that beautiful. The others adore what I do to them."

Ms Flament and the other women said they felt too "guilty" and "ashamed" to tell their parents.

"I thought my parents would be so disappointed if I stopped the photo shoots," said the first girl, who continued to be "under his spell".

Another girl told her parents she wanted to stop after two sessions.

The first girl told Nouvel Observateur that she had tried to forget the whole incident but that "it has had huge consequences on my sex life".

"I had suicidal tendencies," she said. In 1997, she filed a legal complaint against Mr Hamilton, who was quizzed on her allegations. He denied any wrongdoing and the inquiry was dropped.

She considered civil proceedings but was told she would have to forward 30,000 francs (£3,000) deposit. "I thought he was too protected that the fight was lost in advance, that it would ruin my life," she told the magazine.

A third woman subsequently contacted Nouvel Observateur claiming that Mr Hamilton raped her in 1967 when she was 14 years old. The women said they were were constantly reminded of the alleged abuse when seeing his photographs of nude, underage girls in books and magazines - including pictures of them.

"It's unbearable to see that he is still using us," the second girl told the magazine. "Ah those famous Hamiltonian looks of melancholy. Now you know why they were melancholy," she is quoted as saying.

Ms Flament and the first two girls worked out that they had crossed paths in Cap d'Agde. "The more numerous we are the stronger we'll be," Ms Flament told Nouvel Observateur.

Mr Hamilton's work depicting early-teenage girls, often nude, he has been the subject of some controversy including child pornography allegations and bans in some countries. "Hamilton's photographs have long been at the forefront of the 'is it art or pornography?' debate," wrote one British newspaper.

In 2005, a man was convicted for being in possession of 19,000 images of children, including photos by Hamilton. The images were found to be in the lowest indecency rating.

In response, Glenn Holland, Mr Hamilton's spokesman, stated: "We are deeply saddened and disappointed by this, as David is one of the most successful art photographers the world has ever known. His books have sold millions".

Following the conviction, a member of the Surrey Police in Britain stated that possessing Hamilton books was now illegal in the UK. Surrey Police later made a formal apology for this statement and admitted that no legally binding decision had been made on the work of David Hamilton.

In 2010, a man was convicted of level 1 child pornography for owning four books bought in a London bookshop, including Mr Hamilton's The Age of Innocence.

His conviction was overturned on appeal in 2011, with the judge calling his conviction "very unfair" and criticising the Crown Prosecution Service, saying if it "wishes to test whether the pictures in the books are indecent, the right way to deal with the matter is by way of prosecuting the publisher or retailer – not the individual purchaser".

LONDON — A desk is like a home away from home for many in the working world.

Family photos, trinkets from a vacation, an extra pair of shoes or spare chopsticks are just some of the things routinely left lying around in what has become personal space.

But that comes at a price for companies, particularly in cities like London or New York, where the cost of real estate is at a premium, and at a time when workers are more mobile than ever.

In its newly opened building in central London, the Swiss banking giant UBS is looking to change the way employees view their relationship with their work spaces.

Many of its employees at 5 Broadgate in the City of London will no longer be tied to the same desk every day with a telephone and desktop computer. Instead, the company has deployed so-called thin desks throughout the building.

Phone handsets were replaced by personal headsets, and employees can log onto their virtual desktops on computers at any desk in the building or at home. There are no laptops to lug around, and their phone numbers follow them from desk to desk or to their mobile devices.

“For me, it’s opening up and allowing people to work in different ways on whatever project, whatever activity they’re working on,” said Andrew Owen, managing director for UBS group corporate services in London. “Being chained to a desk in a singular environment is restrictive.”

Employees have a small amount of filing space and a locker where they can keep any personal items they might use during the day. (Larger caches of documents that are held on paper for the longer term can be retrieved from an off-site location within two hours.)

The elimination of fixed desks is not a new concept — it has proved particularly popular among technology companies and start-ups — but only in recent years has technology made it more viable for larger companies.

It is still a rarity, however, in investment banking. Citigroup is one of the few companies that has a similar setup, at its new headquarters in downtown Manhattan.

And the practice has not yet infiltrated all aspects of UBS’s business.

The trading floors at UBS in London still have a more traditional setup, with groups of employees heading to the same set of desks each day to view three or six screens of trading data.

But that could change in the future. “The trading desk is our next port of call to achieve user mobility,” Ashley Davis, managing director for the UBS corporate center in London, said.

By having a more mobile setup for its employees, UBS believes it is able to use its real estate more efficiently. The company is using a ratio of one available desk for every 1.2 employees who work in the new building in London.

More than 6,000 people will ultimately work there; about 89 percent have moved in so far.

There are common areas where employees can gather for meetings or work if the company finds itself at full desk capacity. Most days, however, someone is traveling or on vacation.

UBS executives insist the shift is not all about costs.

“I would be wrong to sit here and say there isn’t an economic efficiency dimension,” Mr. Owen said. “In and of itself, that’s not the reason to do it. It would fail on that basis. It has to be of value to our staff and our structure in the way we operate. There has to be a value there.”

UBS spent two years preparing workers in London for the new mobile desk concept and addressing their concerns, Mr. Owen said.

The new metal-covered office building, designed by Ken Shuttleworth of Make Architects, had to overcome a variety of challenges to fit into the neighborhood.

It could not block the view of St. Paul’s Cathedral in central London from King Henry’s Mound, 14 miles away in Richmond. (Legend has it that the mound was the spot where Henry VIII watched a rocket fired from the Tower of London to signal the execution of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, but historians believe the story to be untrue.)

As a result, the 700,000-square-foot building is long and flat and rises only 13 stories, what Make calls a “groundscraper” rather than a skyscraper. UBS has a 20-year lease on the property.

Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout the building.

UBS first started a pilot project for mobile desks in Switzerland in 2010 — about the same time it was preparing for the construction of its new building in London.

It now has 25,000 to 30,000 employees using mobile desktops in Switzerland and is rolling out the concept to its operations in Nashville and India. By the end of 2017, the company expects to have about 72,000 thin desks globally.

“Working together, talking to each other, working in a more agile way. People are probably not so fixed any more in their working environment,” said Harald Egger, UBS’s head of group corporate services and sourcing. “They work much more in projects.”

Forcing staff to start work before 10am is tantamount to torture and is making employees ill, exhausted and stressed, an Oxford University academic has claimed.

Before the age of 55, the circadian rhythms of adults are completely out of sync with normal 9-to-5 working hours, which poses a "serious threat" to performance, mood and mental health.

Dr Paul Kelley, of Oxford University, said there was a need for a huge societal change to move work and school starting times to fit with the natural body clock of humans.

Experiments studying circadian rhythms have shown that the average 10-year-old will not start focussing properly for academic work before 8.30am. Similarly, a 16-year-old should start at 10am for best results and university students should start at 11am.

Dr Kelley believes that simply moving school times could raise grades by 10 per cent. He was formerly a head teacher at Monkseaton Middle School, in North Tyneside, where he changed the school start day from 8.30am to 10am and found that the number of top grades rose by 19 per cent.

Similarly, companies who force employees to start work earlier are also likely to be hurting their output, while storing up health problems for staff.

"This is a huge society issue," Dr Kelley told the British Science a Festival in Bradford. "Staff should start at 10am. You don't get back to (the 9am) starting point till 55. Staff are usually sleep-deprived. We've got a sleep-deprived society.